2013
intimacy
towards a more quiet region of feeling
intimacy
towards a more quiet region of feeling
5 Person Show | Koel Gallery
Curated by Maha Malik
Curated by Maha Malik
Ayessha Quraishi has used abstract method across the body of her work. Her practice may be understood in terms of a formal, contemplative art aesthetic. Quraishi's works on paper are non-discursive in the first instance, and they suggest the meditative, as subject matter. The artist mediates with her hands directly. Moving oils on paper, she seems to render the very experience of objectless states. ‘You create an armature for silence, a holding place for emptiness to be.’ Quraishi seems to instill in her works a rich sense of stillness, a way of being in the depths where there appears no thing, and not void, but a place of living and expressive matter, light. Her compositions use the formal apparatus of color, line, and texture, rhythmically finessed to the point paint yields its own luster. It illuminates the environment at hand.
The power of such privation may be sourced in a series of small diaries, art journals covered in dull gold. The artist has maintained these journals as reference for over two decades. They carry the same gestural activity as her larger works on paper and on timber, except for their slight format. Each book opens to jeweled color and to graphite markings in the manner of a naïve art. For her current works, the artist has photographed selected pages from her diaries, digitally reworking them for print. These are then scaled and manually addressed with oils, as per her practice. The contemporary distinction between digital image and painting, with all its biases in tow, becomes radically blurred in the work.
In how many ways may one source yield itself? The question is raised here as both creative challenge and as ethical value.
Quraishi explores the relationship between singular utterance and a proliferation of meaning in this particular suit of images. And, as per her prior thematics, the exhaustive technique suggests a particular kind of personal aesthetics. Emptying out, as the work of praise in art.
Maha Malik
The power of such privation may be sourced in a series of small diaries, art journals covered in dull gold. The artist has maintained these journals as reference for over two decades. They carry the same gestural activity as her larger works on paper and on timber, except for their slight format. Each book opens to jeweled color and to graphite markings in the manner of a naïve art. For her current works, the artist has photographed selected pages from her diaries, digitally reworking them for print. These are then scaled and manually addressed with oils, as per her practice. The contemporary distinction between digital image and painting, with all its biases in tow, becomes radically blurred in the work.
In how many ways may one source yield itself? The question is raised here as both creative challenge and as ethical value.
Quraishi explores the relationship between singular utterance and a proliferation of meaning in this particular suit of images. And, as per her prior thematics, the exhaustive technique suggests a particular kind of personal aesthetics. Emptying out, as the work of praise in art.
Maha Malik
